Integrity Print selects Epicor for growth and diversification

David Wright, supply chain manager for the £63 million turnover company, says the firm will be implementing Epicor for Printing and Packaging, and expects to gain full Kodak workflow integration. "Print is a rapidly moving industry, and the legacy architecture and limited functionality of our ageing system was beginning to force us down a cul-de-sac," he says. "So we took this decision to protect our continued growth." Wright explains that Integrity Print has been using a heavily customised green-screen MIS system, but, with a complex and poorly documented database structure, the system has become inflexible and difficult to develop. In turn this made it impractical to modify the system to integrate with the company's Kodak Prinergy digital workflow system, or change functionality to meet the demands of modern printing, such as digital production and personalisation. "The artwork system is a primary application for any print business, but once a customer has signed off the job, we have to manually transfer that information into the legacy system every time to schedule and trigger the production run," states Wright. "In addition, we hold stock for customers that they can call-off via a website. This, again, cannot be integrated into our existing system, requiring a rekeying of the requirement between applications." Epicor for Printing and Packing was developed in partnership with Kodak. Hence, it allows seamless integration with the firm's unified workflow solutions, such as Integrity's Prinergy. Once the system has been implemented, Integrity will get full automation of production scheduling and manufacturing as soon as artwork is approved by customers. Wright also explects Epicor's SOA architecture to give the firm the ability to integrate its customer Stock Call-Off portal into Epicor, giving the organisation an integrated business system for the first time. "We just couldn't afford the risk and cost of downtime, if we applied an update to the existing system – all our customisation would need rewriting," states Wright. "One of the things that really stood out for us with Epicor, is that it is highly flexible and separates business rules from the underlying code. We now have a clear path for upgrades and are confident that the system is versatile enough to cope with new opportunities that we have not even thought of yet."